VMworld 2012 Day 1.

I know, I know, I said I would do better at posting and all of a sudden 6 months have gone by without a post. It’s been a busy 6 months. Both at home and at work. But that’s no excuse, so hopefully VMworld will inspire me to get back into the flow. I’ll try to talk about what I have been doing very soon. But first, here I am at VMworld again. I’m going to try to blog this on a day to day basis, even though I am already a day late.

So, day 1 really started on day 0. VMworld kicked off with the reception on Sunday night instead of Monday night. The reception had a different feel this year and I’m not really sure why. It seems like there are many more booths, but for the first time I felt like I actually have room to walk between the booths without running over someone or getting stepped on. I can even dodge unwanted scanning! A couple of things that vendors don’t want to hear…if I want to hear about your product I will stop and ask about it, otherwise, don’t try to scan me as I walk by so you can spam me and call me over and over. Number 2, no I don;t want another T-shirt that I will never wear. Want me to advertise your product for free? Give me a golf shirt. Number 3, if you hire pretty girls to wear a Storm outfit, I will never remember your name, you will always be the vendor with the girls dressed like Storm. Now that I have been on my rant, the other thing I notice is that while there are a lot of vendors, there doesn’t seem to be anything innovative that made me stop and say “Wow”. Just seems like a lot of vendors promising to make your cloud bigger, better, faster, stronger… A friend of mine did point out that there is no Microsoft this year. I’m curious as to why that is. While I am on my rants, Oracle is everywhere outside the conference. SUVs are parked outside with ads on them saying that Oracle is more scalable than VMware and better yet FREE! Anyone ever known Oracle to do anything for free? I thought not.

Now to Day 1. Keynote was good after the weird drum intro. To me, the new CEO has a much better delivery than Paul. The end of vRam was huge, even though almost everyone knew it was coming. Brilliant move by VMware. Now there are a bunch of people like me that bought more licenses than they needed based on the vRam licensing model. They spent a year generating revenue by having customers over purchase licenses. Sure I will use the extra ones at some point, but until then, I will be paying maintenance on them. Brilliant. Also the announcement of vCloud Suite is interesting, waiting to see if it will be an actual integrated suite or just a sales bundle. Monster VMs getting bigger and faster were also announced. Now 1 million IOPS to the VM, not the host. Impressive. Enhanced vmotion was also announced, which is vmotion minus shared storage. Interesting concept but another breakout session led me to believe this isn’t coming as fast as the general session made it seem.

That brings me to the breakouts, always my biggest hope and sometimes my biggest disappointment. This year the first day I attended three discussion groups. These were very good, much better than a presentation. Alan Renouf held a great discussion on PowerCLI and Frank Denneman held a very good session that was based around asking question around user environments. I did attend one discussion where the moderator just spent his time presenting and left out the discussion, but I will ake two out of three. I also attended the “ask the expert vBloggers” session. That is always entertaining, but the questions were soft and much the same as last year. “Why did you get started blogging,” “How has blogging changed your life,” “what is in your home lab?” Chad seems to have a nice home lab by the way. Sounds like it rivals Jason Boche’s. That was basically my first day in a nutshell. On a break during day two at the moment, an so far it has been a good experience. More on that later, I hope.